Later today, Olivia was coming to stay with him for the first time. It was a bold move for two people who knew each other so little, but neither of them had wanted to end the last weekend with vague promises to meet in a future of crumbling enthusiasm and growing diffidence. At the conference in Oxford there had seemed to be some subterranean attraction that connected them before they were introduced. They felt something more like recognition than discovery. Olivia was certainly pretty, her dark brown hair set off her pale blue eyes in an obviously striking way, but it was the clarity of the eyes themselves that got to him. He had the sense of someone who would not just hold his gaze, as she did when they first met, long past the fading smiles of routine sociability, but someone who would also hold the gaze of an unsettling experience or an inconvenient fact. It was a kind of moral seduction that lent inevitability to her physical appeal. They had only spent one night together, but it had the tentative intensity of a love affair rather than the practised abandon of hedonism.